Inquisitions and Heresies (General Collections)

The Penn Libraries have long housed the extraordinary text and manuscript holdings of the Henry Charles Lea Library, part of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts. His library is one of Penn's most significant collections and a preeminent resource on the history of the medieval and early modern Catholic Church and related matters, especially inquisitions, magic, witchcraft, alchemy, and heresy. Likewise, the University has a long history of scholars working on these topics. In support of these collections and faculty interest, the Libraries has built an extraordinary collection of related secondary and primary sources in its general collections.

The Libaries have systematic plans with vendors in the United States and Europe to sell us works about inquisitions and related subjects. However, some books inevitably don't get purchased through these plans because they are deemed out of scope or are overlooked. Consequently, Penn librarians periodically pursue major retrospective purchasing projects to identify important material that we did not receive through standard plans. Material purchased in this way often fills particularly interesting gaps, including fictional work and graphic representations of inquisitions, which are part of a comprehensive collection on the topic but some may deem irrelevant for scholarly purposes.

In addition, the libraries actively purchase large primary source collections that provide access to related material in other libraries. For instance, the groundbreaking Witchcraft in Europe and America microform collection includes over a thousand texts on witchcraft, including many rare and fragile manuscripts containing eyewitness account of the torture, trial, and execution of the suspected. The collection spans the 15th to 20th centuries. Another microfilm collection sourced from Trinity College, Dublin, focuses on the Roman Inquisition during the medieval and Renaissance periods.

Other primary source collections include databases of digitized material. For instance, Inquisitions: Manuscripts of the Spanish, Portuguese and French Inquisitions in the British Library, London is a collection narrowly focused on the history of inquisitions. On a grander scale, Early English Books Online is the single most comprehensive collection of digital facsimiles of texts published in England from the late 15th to the end of the 17th centuries, containing nearly 150,000 books in English and Latin, including many books translated from other European languages.